This is a lifesaver, thank you! For those who are running into a duplicate head showing up, double click your metahuman under "Actors" in the Take Recorder, then look right to your Outliner and click the eye icon to hide the highlighted bar with your MetaHuman on it. You should be left with only the recording of your face!
I was searching and asking for this issue and finally an angel come to show us how it works thank you extra thank you ultimate thank you superior thank you
I used your suggestions after getting nowhere with combing mixamo body animation with livelink face recorded head rotations. Since I did not real grasp what you were doing, I played around myself and I think there is actually a way easier solution to this problem. Instead of changing the blend per bone from branched to blend masks, I just added a fourth item in the branch list and named it "Head" and now the head rotation from the live link recording is working.
I'm glad you've found another solution! It's all trial and error at this stage haha as a lot of the features are not really documented properly. If you end up writing a tutorial article or making a video at any stage, please share it around! Might be useful for the others in the community with similar issues
@@elliejayliquid Thank you, well maybe down the line I might do a tutorial on this. right now, I'm myself just starting out. I just started working with metahumans not even a week ago, but I'm happy how much I've already got working for now. So, even though I did not end up using your method, your video still pointed me to look at the right spot to find the problem and come up with a solution. So thank you for that! :)
OK it was little bit difficult. but I finally copy your moves in video. but you know mine is 5.1.1 version. Follow everything you did in this video, still not working :( do you have any solution for 5.1.1?
I don't know why, but after i shadowed the instructions face animations stopped working at all (even blinking and mouth opening). I don't know, what i did wrong, maybe i haven't noticed something... I will try again, but if you have an idea please can you tell me?.. Sorry for asking, I know it's quite hard to suppose what unknown user did wrong, but maybe you have faced the same problem Many thanks anyway!
My man, I recorded this in between having a full-time job and and an indie-game studio and also a life in general, I'm sorry there is not mouse click, I don't have time to rerecord it, some people found this useful, some not, no need for wtfs in the comments. This video was the result of me crying over this issue for over 2 months without any help on Unreal forums.
i dont get it, iv tried this so many times, this seems to be the way people fix it... but it just wont work, i lose all mouth animations at the expense of head rotations... i dont get it... i wana smash my face into my keyboard....
I couldn't find layerblend in my face anim blueprint. my animation is recorded through livelink. not metahuman animator. Is that the reason? please help
Hello Ellie! I think this tutorial will come in very handy in a very near future. I would like to get a bit of context because I cant grasp the idea of workflow for the animations in UE5 yet. Hopefully you can shed some light for me! :) To keep it simple - I created my human model with stylized proportions outside of Unreal Engine. I used MetaHuman geometry and rig / skin on my custom made model. Animated my model in Maya and imported that animation into Unreal. This is about cinematic video production. Can I then use Live Link facial animations and combine them with the mesh and animations that were imported from Maya to Unreal? So I can have my character do animations from Maya and have facial expressions from LiveLink while doing those animations. I see you wrote a description under your video that might answer my question, but I just want to make sure I understand this right! :) Thank you so much!
Hi Antedor! I think that as long as you reuse Metahuman live link setup (they have that in the animation blueprint for the face from memory), it should in theory work? It's a pretty cool experiment, I hope it works out!
but this is a separate head? what my character is wearing tube top and hence it's visible the head, nech, upper cheat, shoulder all connected! how do I combine then? Can't I directly animate the face of base mesh metahuman character?
@@elderscrawler6202 Same here, its actually kinda exciting to be able to use technology like that to help out. Just wish Unreal documented their workflows a bit better for some parts.
@@elliejayliquid Yeah, I think all these new systems are still very experimental so it's quite difficult sometimes to find the right answer for something, you just have to try a few different ways until you get it to work... But it's absolutely incredible what is possible to achieve nowadays... things we could only dream of back then... :D
Hi, great tutorial, thank you for it. I'm in 5.1.1 and my problem is that if I bake the face animation to control rig for tweaking, i'm unable to keep the head rotation. I've looked several posts and tutorials and none of them seems to work. Have you run into this issue? Thank you very much!
Hi Oli! The only thing I could think of is to check whether you might be exporting the bones inside a group (then you just need to unparent those first), and that group has rotational values or has orientation different from the root bone? A good way to check is when you export an fbx, try to import it into a clean scene, and see what the composition of the file looks like: are there any extra nodes, do they have any weird name spaces?
I have exactly this problem when applying runtime/live lipsync anim to face while body doing its idle anim. But your trick didnt solve it in my case at runtime. Any idea for this? 🙏
When I do the said changes in this video, I get a warning for the "Modify Curve"-Node. "Node Modify Curve uses potentially thread-unsafe call Modify Curve . Disable threaded update or use a thread-safe call. Function may need BlueprintThreadSafe metadata adding. " Can someone help me with that? Thx.
at last some one solved my problem.... yet. you blend by head and i see many facial controls come from the neck ? is it possible ? should i blend by head or neck bone ?
To be honest, I have not tried to blend by neck, but you can definitely give it a go! You'd just need to include the neck bone into that mask setup... I think the reason why I was suspicious about the neck is that the body rig also has a neck bone, so I'm worried that if you let the neck of the face rotate, maybe the body neck won't behave the correct way and the skinning will break?
Ahaha, update the project to a newer version of the engine is not really something I find pleasant either. Regarding the head rotation, I had encountered the problem several months ago (I got around by converting the facial anim to control rig, then I took the keys of the head rotation and pasted them on a additive control rig track of the body animation track, and finaly I was able to rebake my body animation with that head rotation! It was very annoying and very dirty). I'll try your solution which looks so much better! Thanks again for your help :)
@@Max01912 Hope it works for you! Yeah, I absolutely agree, updated my project from 4 to 5 and most of my animations were very broken, it was terrifying, so I'm very cautious about the latest release now haha
No Ellie, I'm not involved in games development, to put it simply, I don't play games...sorry. I love 3D animations, it's what I spend my time on. I'm in Hawkes Bay 😁
Is your solution just to change BranchFilter to BlendMask and set the BlendMask of head to 1?After I set according to your settings, I still can't? I play head animation through blueprints instead of sequences. Are there any other special settings? please help me？
Heya, I'm not super sure about playing through Blueprints as I've only tested it on sequences. In theory, they should both act the same. I'm on holidays until mid January, no access to my pc, but I'll try to see if I can help when I'm back!
@@elliejayliquid Hey! Thanks for a great tutorial, the sequencer fix works indeed, but I have the same problem as @user, it doesn't fix it when you try and do a "play animation" in blueprints for the head and the body. Been searching everywhere but can't seem to fix it, any luck? Thanks!
Hi Kiddy! You will need to open the Face_Archetype_Skeleton. From there, on the left top side of the screen, there's a little cog. Click on its drop down. In there, there's an option called 'Create Blend Mask'. Click on it. It will create a blend mask for you, give it a name, in my case it was BlendHead. And you will see a list of joints underneath, and to the right of those - a list of zeroes. Find a joint called 'head', and change the number next to it to one (the other joints all stay at zero). Save the Face_Archetype_Skeleton, and you should be able to use that mask from now on.
@@wizzy2600 On the left side where you normally have variables, at the top of that little tab, you should be able to see it under Animation Graphs dropdown, if you double click AnimGraph, it will open up for you next to the EventGraph.
Your moving way too fast, going forwards and backwards, deleting and then repeating. Set your scene up from the beginning and move in a specific order. Speak to the people who don't have a clue as to what you're doing.
@@borrowedtruths6955 Plenty of people of who figured out what's happening in this video. If I had more time, I'd definitely reupload it, but I have two jobs and family obligations, so your negative comments are not really solving anything.
Great tutorial! Do you think there is a way to change specific face expressions for the metahuman ingame? like change an Idle face animation, to a pain face animation, when someone shoots at the player for example.
I have only managed to do it with blinks, and I've used face anim bp from memory to do it. However, I haven't checked if it's possible to have head rotation + face anims in game yet. You might need to do do some experimentation with it, sorry I don't have a straight answer! Will update my reply in the future once I get to that part for my project.
![OsamaSon - ik what you did last summer [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4DIQDnu3mr4/mqdefault.jpg)
This is such a very specific problem that I found almost impossible to research. This fixed it perfectly. Thank you so much!
Thank you Brandon, I'm glad it worked for you! :) Yeah, this problem was annoying me so much for weeks and weeks hahaha
This is a lifesaver, thank you!
For those who are running into a duplicate head showing up, double click your metahuman under "Actors" in the Take Recorder, then look right to your Outliner and click the eye icon to hide the highlighted bar with your MetaHuman on it. You should be left with only the recording of your face!
I have come back to this video multiple times to fix this issue. Thanks so much, liked and saved!
Thank you! Glad it's helped :)
I was searching and asking for this issue and finally an angel come to show us how it works
thank you
extra thank you
ultimate thank you
superior thank you
Hahaha thank you so much, glad this helped you! :)
Thank you so much. I was trying to fix head rotation of my Metahumans in game. Thanks a lot. Very helpful !!
You are very welcome, glad it's still helping people on their game dev journey! :)
thank you ,really helpful!!
I used your suggestions after getting nowhere with combing mixamo body animation with livelink face recorded head rotations. Since I did not real grasp what you were doing, I played around myself and I think there is actually a way easier solution to this problem. Instead of changing the blend per bone from branched to blend masks, I just added a fourth item in the branch list and named it "Head" and now the head rotation from the live link recording is working.
I'm glad you've found another solution! It's all trial and error at this stage haha as a lot of the features are not really documented properly. If you end up writing a tutorial article or making a video at any stage, please share it around! Might be useful for the others in the community with similar issues
@@elliejayliquid Thank you, well maybe down the line I might do a tutorial on this. right now, I'm myself just starting out. I just started working with metahumans not even a week ago, but I'm happy how much I've already got working for now. So, even though I did not end up using your method, your video still pointed me to look at the right spot to find the problem and come up with a solution. So thank you for that! :)
Hi, just a quick question where is ""branch list" you're talking about please ? I don't really know what you're talking about
@@hethfilms thank you so much for your answer, i'll try that ! ;)
Where is the branch list?
The video was very hard to follow haha, but it worked in the end! thanks
Mam it would be great if people could see your mouse cursor to follow what you're doing
BLESS YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!! thank you for sharing the solution for this annoying problem :)
Great Ellie, will try when I get to desktop
Madam Ellie,
Thanks a lot.This solved my problem. The LOrd bless you. Will have a fun collaboration with my 8 year old daughter.
OK it was little bit difficult. but I finally copy your moves in video. but you know mine is 5.1.1 version. Follow everything you did in this video, still not working :( do you have any solution for 5.1.1?
I don't know why, but after i shadowed the instructions face animations stopped working at all (even blinking and mouth opening). I don't know, what i did wrong, maybe i haven't noticed something... I will try again, but if you have an idea please can you tell me?.. Sorry for asking, I know it's quite hard to suppose what unknown user did wrong, but maybe you have faced the same problem
Many thanks anyway!
Where you mouse cursor?
Not working for me, struggling to find a solution to retain head movement from the animator recording.
there is no mouse pointer, I can't understand where you are clicking, wtf
My man, I recorded this in between having a full-time job and and an indie-game studio and also a life in general, I'm sorry there is not mouse click, I don't have time to rerecord it, some people found this useful, some not, no need for wtfs in the comments. This video was the result of me crying over this issue for over 2 months without any help on Unreal forums.
this is great, thank you!
Amazing video, this helped alot
you are a mother for all of us
thank you so much from paris
@@antimatiereworlds8529 Hahahaha thank you, glad this method has helped you!
i dont get it, iv tried this so many times, this seems to be the way people fix it... but it just wont work, i lose all mouth animations at the expense of head rotations... i dont get it... i wana smash my face into my keyboard....
I couldn't find layerblend in my face anim blueprint. my animation is recorded through livelink. not metahuman animator. Is that the reason? please help
How can I open this Anim graph? Not showing here, not even in "windows"
thank you so much. You deserve my subscribe. :D
In my case it works by just removing all branch filters and having just one with neck_01 bone
Thank you so much!!
Hello Ellie! I think this tutorial will come in very handy in a very near future. I would like to get a bit of context because I cant grasp the idea of workflow for the animations in UE5 yet. Hopefully you can shed some light for me! :)
To keep it simple - I created my human model with stylized proportions outside of Unreal Engine. I used MetaHuman geometry and rig / skin on my custom made model. Animated my model in Maya and imported that animation into Unreal. This is about cinematic video production. Can I then use Live Link facial animations and combine them with the mesh and animations that were imported from Maya to Unreal? So I can have my character do animations from Maya and have facial expressions from LiveLink while doing those animations.
I see you wrote a description under your video that might answer my question, but I just want to make sure I understand this right! :)
Thank you so much!
Hi Antedor! I think that as long as you reuse Metahuman live link setup (they have that in the animation blueprint for the face from memory), it should in theory work? It's a pretty cool experiment, I hope it works out!
but this is a separate head? what my character is wearing tube top and hence it's visible the head, nech, upper cheat, shoulder all connected! how do I combine then? Can't I directly animate the face of base mesh metahuman character?
Ok 👌 now how do I link face setup 😢😢😢
It's no surprise model heads have stopped spinning - 3D animation has become so complex! 😅
I blame unreal xD
Always had been complex :D now at least we have motion capture... I used to do everything by hand back in the day
@@elderscrawler6202 Same here, its actually kinda exciting to be able to use technology like that to help out. Just wish Unreal documented their workflows a bit better for some parts.
@@elliejayliquid Yeah, I think all these new systems are still very experimental so it's quite difficult sometimes to find the right answer for something, you just have to try a few different ways until you get it to work...
But it's absolutely incredible what is possible to achieve nowadays... things we could only dream of back then... :D
animation is still the same, it's combining 2 different animations and blending them by bone that is developing.
Hi, great tutorial, thank you for it. I'm in 5.1.1 and my problem is that if I bake the face animation to control rig for tweaking, i'm unable to keep the head rotation. I've looked several posts and tutorials and none of them seems to work. Have you run into this issue? Thank you very much!
When I export just the face bones from maya the head export side ways, have you encountered this issue?
Hi Oli! The only thing I could think of is to check whether you might be exporting the bones inside a group (then you just need to unparent those first), and that group has rotational values or has orientation different from the root bone?
A good way to check is when you export an fbx, try to import it into a clean scene, and see what the composition of the file looks like: are there any extra nodes, do they have any weird name spaces?
I have exactly this problem when applying runtime/live lipsync anim to face while body doing its idle anim. But your trick didnt solve it in my case at runtime. Any idea for this? 🙏
Hi Denniss! Sorry, I haven't tried doing a combo of an idle + livelink in realtime, if I have a bit of time over the weekend, I'll give it a go!
您好，运行时口同步找到解决方案了吗？谢谢
@@elliejayliquid Hello, has runtime mouth sync found a solution yet? thank you!
When I do the said changes in this video, I get a warning for the "Modify Curve"-Node.
"Node Modify Curve uses potentially thread-unsafe call Modify Curve . Disable threaded update or use a thread-safe call. Function may need BlueprintThreadSafe metadata adding. "
Can someone help me with that? Thx.
where does come the blendHead ?
at last some one solved my problem.... yet. you blend by head and i see many facial controls come from the neck ? is it possible ? should i blend by head or neck bone ?
To be honest, I have not tried to blend by neck, but you can definitely give it a go! You'd just need to include the neck bone into that mask setup... I think the reason why I was suspicious about the neck is that the body rig also has a neck bone, so I'm worried that if you let the neck of the face rotate, maybe the body neck won't behave the correct way and the skinning will break?
Very helpfull thanks a lot !
You're welcome! I wonder if the latest Unreal has this issue fixed, haven't checked it out yet, too scared to update the project xD
Ahaha, update the project to a newer version of the engine is not really something I find pleasant either.
Regarding the head rotation, I had encountered the problem several months ago (I got around by converting the facial anim to control rig, then I took the keys of the head rotation and pasted them on a additive control rig track of the body animation track, and finaly I was able to rebake my body animation with that head rotation! It was very annoying and very dirty). I'll try your solution which looks so much better! Thanks again for your help :)
@@Max01912 Hope it works for you! Yeah, I absolutely agree, updated my project from 4 to 5 and most of my animations were very broken, it was terrifying, so I'm very cautious about the latest release now haha
Where did you import the head rotation from?
I find UE 5 difficult regarding character animations.
Same here, it's been a steep learning curve, and everything was broken when I ported my project from ue4 to ue5.
I really would love to use UE more but it's complexity make me hesitant.
I'm also in NZ 👍
@@PP3D oh that's great! Are you going to game development meet-ups? I sometimes, albeit rarely, go there.
@@PP3D oh actually which city haha 😂 I'm in Auckland
No Ellie, I'm not involved in games development, to put it simply, I don't play games...sorry.
I love 3D animations, it's what I spend my time on.
I'm in Hawkes Bay 😁
Is your solution just to change BranchFilter to BlendMask and set the BlendMask of head to 1?After I set according to your settings, I still can't? I play head animation through blueprints instead of sequences. Are there any other special settings? please help me？
Heya, I'm not super sure about playing through Blueprints as I've only tested it on sequences. In theory, they should both act the same. I'm on holidays until mid January, no access to my pc, but I'll try to see if I can help when I'm back!
@@elliejayliquid Thank you very much for your reply.I'll try again
@@elliejayliquid Hey! Thanks for a great tutorial, the sequencer fix works indeed, but I have the same problem as @user, it doesn't fix it when you try and do a "play animation" in blueprints for the head and the body. Been searching everywhere but can't seem to fix it, any luck? Thanks!
Hi 🙂, how to create your BlendHead ?
Hi Kiddy! You will need to open the Face_Archetype_Skeleton. From there, on the left top side of the screen, there's a little cog. Click on its drop down. In there, there's an option called 'Create Blend Mask'. Click on it. It will create a blend mask for you, give it a name, in my case it was BlendHead. And you will see a list of joints underneath, and to the right of those - a list of zeroes. Find a joint called 'head', and change the number next to it to one (the other joints all stay at zero). Save the Face_Archetype_Skeleton, and you should be able to use that mask from now on.
Why your Face_AnimBP looks completely different in your project than in my?
Ok, because you are in Animgraph not EventGraph. But how can I open animgraph while opening this Face blueprint?
@@wizzy2600 On the left side where you normally have variables, at the top of that little tab, you should be able to see it under Animation Graphs dropdown, if you double click AnimGraph, it will open up for you next to the EventGraph.
@@elliejayliquid Thanks a lot Ellie.
@@kthxbye1132 You are most welcome! :)
Your moving way too fast, going forwards and backwards, deleting and then repeating. Set your scene up from the beginning and move in a specific order. Speak to the people who don't have a clue as to what you're doing.
You can make a tutorial like that, I needed a quick fix and recorded a quick video. Good luck.
@@elliejayliquid If I could make a tutorial like that, I wouldn't be one of the ones who doesn't have a clue, would I?
@@borrowedtruths6955 Plenty of people of who figured out what's happening in this video. If I had more time, I'd definitely reupload it, but I have two jobs and family obligations, so your negative comments are not really solving anything.
Please go slower. Even frame by frame I can't tell what you are doing. Your narrations doesn't seem to be fitting what you are clicking on and doing.
Great tutorial! Do you think there is a way to change specific face expressions for the metahuman ingame? like change an Idle face animation, to a pain face animation, when someone shoots at the player for example.
I have only managed to do it with blinks, and I've used face anim bp from memory to do it. However, I haven't checked if it's possible to have head rotation + face anims in game yet. You might need to do do some experimentation with it, sorry I don't have a straight answer! Will update my reply in the future once I get to that part for my project.
@@elliejayliquidall good! :D thank you for taking your time to reply! I will also let you know if I discover how to do it, someday lol